JUST  AN  AVERAGE  SESSION  ON  THE  MEANDER  RIVER  TODAY 31/3/2014

Being the last day of March and  given that the conditions were pretty good I thought I would give the Meander River a go today after lunch. The weather was a little on the humid side with a light East to North Easterly breeze and very heavy cloud cover making it reasonably good for trout fishing. The only down fall was the wind direction, but in saying that it was very light and so it hopefully won't effect the fishing that much. 
I arrived at the Meander River just on 12.50pm and was soon in the river after a short walk and a little bit of bush bashing. The river was at least 150mms higher than my last trip here and was flowing fairly strong in most sections. I started of in a long section of the river that was reasonably wide and began flicking a little Mepps gold black fury to the opposite bank, then with a slow retrieve whilst letting it drift with the flow, it wasn't long before I notice a brown just sitting of the back of the spinner. So with a light lift and twitch of the rod this trout just smashed the spinner as it fluttered and dropped a little in the flow. It wasn't over big (370gms) and was soon in the net and released unharmed. I had now worked my way to the head water of this long stretch of river where I hooked into another brown that tossed the spinner on the first head shake.
 
Ahead of me was some very rocky stretches of fast water and with the river being higher than normal here I knew it was going to be tough going. I fished on upstream for some thirty minutes without a single hit, plus I was finding it was just getting too hard fighting my way upstream against this fast water. In some places the depth was between the knees and waist making it unsafe, so I decided to get out and move onto another stretch of river some two kilometres further up that I knew was much easier to wade when the river was higher than normal. The only thing about this spot was the three hundred meter walk to the river before wetting the lure. Then there's the long walk back after fishing some 1.5 kms of river when I'm totally worn out. Still that's just a something one has to do when fishing rivers isn't it. If you want to fish rivers then you got to be prepared to put in the effort to get the rewards and that's it. I think that's why I love fishing them so much is for that very reason.
 
Anyway I was back in the river now staying with the same spinner I picked up another (330gm) brown in the second section of river that I fished. Then over the next hundred metres I managed one more brown and lost it at the net. There were a few fish in this area as I was having several follows but they were just sitting some 75mms off the spinner. I tried several different Mepps spinners and Rapala's with the same results. The only difference was that they followed the Mepps but not the Rapala's. So I went back to the gold black fury as this lure had at least got a few trout to take it. 
 
I thought I would fish the next couple of hundred meters of river and then call it a day. Well over that distance I did catch two more browns from three hook ups and six hits on the little spinner. The biggest brown went 490gms and the other little one, well it was too small to even think about weighing. I think this little fella" is now the smallest brown that I have ever caught on the Mepps spinner, or any set up actually. All I felt was a light bump and as I retrieved the lure as it just felt like the spinner had picked up a leaf or a bit of algae. Then I spotted a little flash in the water as the lure came closer and knew there was a little one hooked. I then decided I'd had enough and called it a day. It was 4.30pm now and I had at least a 30 minute or so walk back to the car and I was buggered as well. So it was an average day on the Meander River, but also an enjoyable one as well, even though the fish were few and far between.
Cheers
Adrian
 
 
 
 
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